In the prior art, when a cloud computing platform architecture (e.g., an open-source cloud computing management platform architecture OpenStack) creates a virtual machine, a virtual machine management module (e.g., an operation component Nova in OpenStack) in the cloud computing platform architecture can retrieve a mirror file through a virtual machine mirror management module (e.g., a virtual machine mirror lookup and retrieval component Glance in OpenStack) and pull the mirror file from a mirror server to create the virtual machine.
Using KVM, a virtual machine based on a hardware virtualization technology, as an example, the mirror file of a virtual machine system disk can be in raw or qcow2 format, and the size is generally in the order of G bytes. If the virtual machine system disk adopts the Windows operating system, the mirror file of the operating system will be close to the order of 10G.
However, the virtual machine management module in the cloud computing platform architecture retrieves the mirror file through the virtual machine mirror management module, and pulls the mirror file to create the virtual machine. Since the virtual machine is created each time with the mirror file pulled from the mirror server through the virtual machine mirror management module, the loads on the server where the virtual machine mirror management module is located and on the mirror server are very heavy, and the speed of creating the virtual machine is relatively slow.